


I See the Moon

by Trins_xxx



Category: Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Coming of Age, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-24 02:15:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9695315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trins_xxx/pseuds/Trins_xxx
Summary: I see the moon, I see the moon, I see the moon, When you're looking at the sunLeah was so tired, so thoroughly depressed over the unchanging desolation that her life had become... Until Rebecca returns to La Push on New Year's Day 2008. Maybe it'll be the year that things will finally change for Leah?Friendship and coming of age story for our favourite female shapeshifter.





	

_ 5th January 2008 _

__

Whenever anyone remembered Rebecca Black, the word that came to mind was _colourful_. Her hair had gone through different shades of colour, before she started having several colours mingling within her hair. Her make-up was as ever changing as the greenery and wet weather in La Push wasn’t. Her language had been loud and bold and colourful didn’t cover the sort of insults she used to come up with, let alone the expletives that fell from her lips more readily than they didn’t. (Leah hadn’t been that much of an anomaly!)

 

Nobody seemed to remember that it had started after her mother died, nobody except Rachel and Leah, it seemed. Maybe that was why the two of them had always understood how fast and how far away Rebecca had ran when she’d been given the opportunity. Back in the day, it had been the three of them, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. Leah hadn’t created those insults just overnight; hadn’t been a sweet, well-mannered girl one moment, and a screaming banshee (as Quil often thought) a second later. They had been the three of them, and even if it was Rebecca and Rachel and Leah individually now, those sorts of influences hadn’t dissipated into nothing, the way Sam’s feelings seemingly had.

 

It’s why Leah should have known better on New Year’s Day.

 

It was her turn to look after Billy and she had been so tired, so thoroughly depressed over the unchanging desolation her life had become that she hadn’t had the energy to cook more than some miserable but healthy porridge for the closest person to a father figure she now had left. (In the most hidden parts of her mind, she sometimes thought he was the only parental figure she had left, after her mother’s backstabbing, self-serving actions of late…)

 

Leah had always strained against leashes, and no leash had ever been tighter than the magical werewolf shapeshifter one. Except as much as things changed and evolved, things stayed the same, _for her_. And a year after the stupid vampire battle that never was, this had still been true and she had the awful feeling that maybe she was tired of straining fruitlessly against it all.

 

Emily was married and happily pregnant. Leah still hated her and Sam; that hadn’t changed. Jacob was more and more absent, more and more absorbed in his little monster princess. He was more absent now than in his infamous angsty Bella days. Leah still felt a strange sort of loyalty to him, if only because he enabled her to get out of Sam’s head. That hadn’t changed. (Nor had her desire to punch him, in the hopes that the concussion might help him to remember his remaining family and friends.) Embry was going through girls faster than he went through clothes (though he had always been one of the calmer wolves), and Quil was equally oblivious to girls in that sort of way. And Leah still disdained them – publically and officially. Privately and unofficially, she might maybe think of them as her brothers, one of them more than the other. That hadn’t changed since they’d joined Jacob’s pack and accepted her as beta (even if they still griped about it). Seth was her baby brother, and that was something Leah wouldn’t ever want changed. Jared was still the crappy friend who had chosen her ex over her, even though they were friends long before he had gotten to know Sam (through her) and she still resented him for it. Paul was still a dick. The puppies were still a mass of irritating little puppies that Leah avoided as much as she could. That hadn’t changed.

 

Nor had the accepted but informal timetable she’d created with Rachel for looking after Billy, when they’d realised they couldn’t count on Jacob anymore.

 

She had been staring morosely out of the window, at the drizzle that seemed to exemplify how she felt. It hadn’t had the energy to develop into a downpour, nor the freedom to disappear either.

 

‘What the _fuck_ is this grey shit?’ had interrupted her somewhat peaceful, if morose, ponderings, and she’d stormed back into the dining room that doubled as a lounge, ready to chew out Rachel for both, insulting her food (as if her cooking was any better) and more importantly, for ignoring their timetable.

 

She’d stared open-mouthed; had looked just like Quil, when people used words with more than two syllables.

 

It hadn’t been Rachel standing there, frowning at the bowl of grey goo. Rebecca had stood there, her hair a wavy, messy ideal of casual beauty, her black hair intermingled with strands of pink and blonde. Wearing a dress, she looked out of place in La Push, with its drizzle frizzing her hair, but her look of outrage and total absence of surprise at seeing Leah in her father’s house, on new year’s day, couldn’t have made her seem more at home.

 

They’d shared their customary exchange of insults, and if Leah had been more vindictive and more bitter than before, neither had commented on it. And the whole time, Rebecca had found berries in the fridge (who the hell had bought the berries?) and added colour to the porridge, making it instantly far more appetising.

 

And when they’d finished insulting everything from Leah’s cuticles to Rebecca’s talons that a hooker would be proud of, Rebecca had launched herself. Leah had stood still once again, her limbs turning to lead, her eyes wider than Embry’s whenever his unwholesome parentage was discussed. And Rebecca had ignored it all, throwing her arms around the girl who’d once been a best friend. Leah had eventually returned the hug because she couldn’t not return it.

 

It hadn’t been the same. A husband and new life in sunny Hawaii, a dead father, a shitty ex and shittier cousin had ensured it, but it had been something.

 

Leah had returned later that day to sort out dinner for Billy (and had been utterly unsurprised to find the food ready on the table, more delicious than anything that Leah could have cooked in her current lacklustre mood). Both Rebecca’s and Billy’s eyes were red-rimmed, but even as he slouched in his wheelchair, Billy had looked more magnolious than he had since the leeches had returned, and it lightened some of the weight on Leah’s shoulders.

 

She’d returned the next day, even though it was Rachel’s day (because it was Rachel’s day) when she knew Rachel would be at work. She’d expected Rebecca’s reddened eyes but her smile, the kind that was small but so genuine that it made her eyes sparkle, made Leah feel tons better.

 

It was why she’d begrudgingly agreed to take Rebecca to Forks today. Rebecca didn’t have a car (hadn’t had one in Hawaii but her face had pinched and Leah knew what it was like to be forced to reveal things she hadn’t wanted to, so she hadn’t pushed) and here they were. Rebecca wore a green dress and brown lipstick. She should have looked earthy but she’d looked like she was posing for a watercolour. She always looked beautiful.

 

They drove to the only hair salon that Forks boasted and Rebecca walked in, sans CV, as if her presence alone would suffice to get her a job. Leah was fully expecting it to work.

 

The eyes turned towards them, not racist or hostile but in awe of the gorgeous hair her friend had.

 

‘My friend needs a pixie cut. With warm mahogany low-lights,’ she told the room at large.

 

Wait, what? ‘What?’ Leah turned to look at her, the adrenaline was pure animalistic fight or flight, but Leah had developed enough control to know it would be the latter, even if she left traumatised folks in her wake.

 

‘Holy shit, that would look gorgeous on you,’ an average girl with unremarkable brown hair spoke, one that Leah recognised as sometimes hanging out with Bella fucking Swan. ‘I hate you a little,’ she added directly to Leah. ‘You’re already gorgeous.’

 

‘She is, isn’t she?’ Rebecca preened on her behalf and shared a warm smile with a stranger who was bound to leave the salon friends with her.

 

‘Yeah, I mean, look at her bone structure. And height. And figure,’ the girl had looked enviously at her but not mean-spirited and Leah had no idea how to deal with that. What do you do with…. _Nice_ people? Like, people who were genuinely nice, not just because they had to be?

 

‘I’m Rebecca and this is Leah,’ Rebecca had beamed at the girl.

 

‘I’m Jessica and you should be a stylist or something.’

 

‘I was thinking something like Twiggy back in the day?’

 

‘Oh that would be fabulous.’

 

‘You should dye your hair red. It’ll make you look a lot more striking and it’ll flatter your skin tone too,’ Rebecca had said after looking the girl – _Jessica_ – over. Her face had brightened and then fallen just as quickly.

 

‘I can’t afford it,’ she’d said and her lump had been the same as Leah’s and Rebecca’s when they’d gotten summer jobs to try and make ends meet.

 

‘We can try it at home,’ Leah hadn’t realised she had been the one to speak until they’d both looked at her and if her skin hadn’t been darkened by the meagre sunlight that La Push offered, she would have flushed red.

 

‘Really?’ Jessica’s smile looked painfully wide but how could Leah refuse? She knew too, too well what it was like to be absolutely skint. (Her mum’s bitchy and biting words still didn’t create a job out of thin air.)

 

Leah had been sat down in the only available chair. (‘Don’t I get a say in this?’ Both Jessica and Rebecca had rolled their eyes and scoffed at her.) Jessica’s hair had been blow-dried and she’d stuck around, the same wistful but admiring look on her face, and god, how long had it been since Leah had felt like a woman, let alone a vaguely decent looking one? Too long – long enough that her throat was as choked as Jessica’s had been.

 

And she hadn’t been able to hold back the tears filling her eyes, though she had stopped them from falling, when she had looked at her finished self. Her hair was short (it would never stop hurting and she would never stop missing the hair that her mum had never cut since she was born) but it was stylish and sleek, the low lights glinted in the sunlight and she looked good. _She actually looked good_.

 

Jessica told her once again that she hated her (but she said this with a warm smile, and it felt more like an affectionate caress than the resentment she still felt from most of the shape-shifter boys). They swapped numbers – Jessica had a smart phone but it must have been at least a couple of years old and there was a scratch on the screen. It felt like they were akin and Leah’s smile didn’t feel forced or fake this time. They made plans to meet up on Monday and dye her hair red, and just like that, Leah had a friend, an actual friend outside the werewolf shit, and it felt liberating.

 

When they left the Salon, the Salon had begged Rebecca to work for them (she was bound to bring business booming in, and not because of her genetic make-up but because she was a creative bad-ass). Leah had ended up leaving with the receptionist job (had that been Rebecca’s aim all along?) because Rebecca had insisted that they came as a duo, and had further insisted that Leah was the most creepily organised person she had ever met in her life. With the best people-skills too. (It was so very hard not to snort at that one).

 

But the upshot was the Rebecca had a job, Leah had a job and looked like a woman, and most significantly, Leah may just have made a new friend.


End file.
